On Sat, May 24, 2003 at 01:40:47PM -0700, Jorge Llambías wrote:
la djordan cusku di'e
What is with this thought that gismu are somehow privledged brivla?
They are somehow privilidged. It is rather obvious that they are,
from the point of view of the morphology.
They are not. They have different behaviors (or they wouldn't be
different classes). But none is privledged.
If I need a brivla that expresses some predicate relation, it does
not matter what type of word it is.
[...]
If you're talking about rafsi, go use zei.
But zei-words don't quite feel like words.
[...]
Well, that's probably because they aren't words. But so what?
I'm not even sure they
are defined as a single word in terms of lojban. Can they be used as
the word delimiter for zoi, for example? Can they be quoted with
zo? (Maybe the answer is yes, but it is not at all intuitive.)
ZEI is parsed in the tanru rules, so no.
[...]
I think this all rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of lojban
word classes. People like to think about gismu, cmavo and lujvo.
But it's actually brivla, cmavo and cmene.
Morphologically, the classes are gismu, cmavo, lujvo, fu'ivla and cmene.
Right.
Syntactically, the classes are BRIVLA, CMENE, KOhA, A, BAI, TAhE, VAU, etc...
I.e. brivla, cmavo and cmene, as I mentioned.
[...]
Gismu, lujvo and fu'ivla
are just different types of brivla; none are more privledged than
the others.
If that were so, then why all the fuss when a new gismu is proposed,
but no fuss when a new lujvo or fu'ivla is proposed?
Because the gismu list is frozen, and there's no reason to prefer
a gismu rather than another brivla. Having a good number of gismu
is desirable, to get rafsi for forming lujvo, however if we decide
we need more it needs to be because we need more for forming lujvo,
not because someone thinks that gismu are privledged and that some
concept (e.g., 'parasite') seems to be 'common' enough or 'important'
enough to deserve it, or that all cultures should be given the
supposedly privledged status.
If you ask why it is frozen (as you no doubt will do); it would not
be smart to allow open season on gismu: the knee-jerk creation of
gismu for things which can be other brivla damage our ability to
increase rafsi for lujvo in the future (and in the process betrays
a lack of understanding about the purpose of the different types
of brivla).